Patricia Conners is a Shareholder at Stearns Weaver Miller, P.A. in Tallahassee, Florida, where she focuses on antitrust compliance counseling and leads the firm’s state attorneys general practice. She is a former Chief Deputy at the Florida Attorney General’s Office, the culmination of a career spanning 36 years and seven attorneys general. Prior to that, during much of her career in the Attorney General’s office, she was the Associate Deputy Attorney General overseeing the Office’s enforcement units, including the Antitrust, Consumer Protection, Lemon Law Arbitration and Civil Rights Divisions. In that role, she often led or co-led high-profile multistate matters such as the states’ opioids distributor settlement negotiations that resulted in a $26 billion and the multistate negotiations involving the five major mortgage servicers regarding various issues that ultimately concluded with Florida obtaining over $9 billion in monetary and other homeowner relief. She also supervised and coordinated the state’s legal and enforcement response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, which was resolved with a $2 billion economic loss recovery for Florida. Ms. Conners served as the Director of the Antitrust Division for the Attorney General’s Office from 1995 until her departure in 2020, where she was responsible for implementing and overseeing the Attorney General’s state and federal antitrust enforcement efforts. During her tenure, the state obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in antitrust recoveries from a variety of matters involving such industries as the pharmaceutical, telecommunication, health care, dairy, retail, and technology industries, among others.
She is board-certified in Antitrust and Trade Regulation by the Florida Bar and is a past chair of the Antitrust and Trade Regulation Certification Committee of the Florida Bar. She is also active in the Antitrust Law Section of the ABA, where she has held a variety of leadership positions.
She was Chair of the NAAG Multistate Antitrust Task Force from 2001 to 2005, a position through which she coordinated multistate antitrust enforcement efforts implemented policy related to Task Force initiatives.
Ms. Conners received both her undergraduate and J.D. degrees from the University of Florida. She teaches portions of a State Attorneys General Seminar offered each January at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.
